Robert Stromberg's "Maleficent"

I took my mom today to the cinema to see this-(she ADORES her 40's and 50's Disneys, and even passed to me her own collection of American children books from those films from her pre-Castro chilhood days).

The film, based in the '59 Disney's "Sleeping BEauty" and played by A. Jolie, centers around the evil character, rather than Aurora. Now, i'm definitely NOT a fan of all the overly saturated special effects/computarized stuff sequences, so popular nowadays, and this film has its fair share of them, but I must say they never really became too long nor overwhelming. While the original film portrays Maleficent in an antagonistic light and does not showcase a single redeeming quality of her personality, here comes this retake with an interesting twist. What I like about it is that the idea was to carefully go around the original story WITHOUT changing it, but rather ADDING to it, sort of as if there would be an extra pair of eyes now focusing in the evil fairy's steps and actions right during the moments where she's invisible in all the previous takes-(Perrault, Grimm, Vsevolozhsky). The rest of the story is more or less the same. And then..Jolie really has the look...that almost cartoonish, non real beauty.

Oh...and now I might link Maleficent/Carabosse's participation in Aurora's wedding from the Russian ballet libretto with Stromberg's film vision. Digging a bit in the original tale, I also now understand the participation of the Ogress Queen-(the Prince's mother, who takes an active, rather macabre part in the post wedding sequence of events in the Perrault original tale)- during the procession of characters in the Mariinsky reconstruction.